Electronic systems and circuits have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reductions in analyzing and communicating data, ideas and trends in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. These results are often achieved utilizing distributed network resources. However, managing the communication to distributed networked resources can be complicated and a number of conditions can adversely impact the timing of various operations. For example, there are usually numerous different users on a network that often have selective desires for various information. Inefficient distribution of the information can have detrimental impacts on the overall performance of a network and end use applications.
Communication networks are usually configured in a hierarchical architecture including multiple layers. For example, the Internet typically includes a first layer, second layer and third layer of hierarchical communication devices. The first layer typically includes end use devices which users utilize to access a network. The second layer devices (e.g., layer 2 switches) are typically utilized to control and manage communications within a subnet (e.g., a local area network). The third layer devices (e.g., layer 3 routers) are typically utilized to route communications between subnets. The speed at which information is communicated and processed usually has a significant impact on the end use applications. Numerous end use applications such as real time applications (e.g., video broadcasts, voice over internet protocol, streaming audio, etc.) are adversely affected if information is not delivered in a timely manner.
The Internet is becoming a very diverse and prevalent communication network. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) are typically utilized for Internet communication and offer a number of advantages. For example, various IP multicast architectures (e.g., mbone) enable users to easily join multicast groups and the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is defined in RFC 1112 as the standard for IP multicasting on the Internet. The IGMP can be utilized by a host to easily establish host memberships in particular multicast groups by informing layer 3 devices (e.g., a router) that the host wants to receive messages addressed to a specific multicast group.
Multicast communications are typically utilized to communicate information over a network to groups of hosts or end users. For example, e-mail mailing lists, media communications (e.g., television), teleconferencing, videoconferencing, etc. often use multicast communications. Multicast technologies used to communicate data are often associated with narrowcast business models and typically send information to a select group rather than every client connected to a network (e.g., in network wide broadcast communications). Multicast is advantageous for communicating large amounts of information because the information can be forwarded to multiple end users simultaneously, rather than other communication mechanisms that use separate connections for each destination and source pair. One set of packets is transmitted to the destinations in a group. However, sending large amounts of information to every member in a group can cause significant bottlenecks and delays in network architecture components by consuming or occupying significant bandwidth of the components.